Talk: The robustness of alternatives

Here is a YouTube video of a talk on Frankfurt-style cases and robust alternative possibilities that I gave back in 2014 at a summer school, hosted by the Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies. They have a ton of great talks available on their YouTube channel.

Some of the background for the ideas I discuss in this talk have recently been published in ‘Robustness and up-to-usness’, although I already think there is a better way to frame the distinction I make in that article between actional states of affairs and non-actional states of affairs.

Other ideas, in particular the idea that Derk Pereboom’s robustness criterion is too strong, are a focus of some of my current work.

The freedom of the will is so far from being, as it is generally considered, a controvertible question of philosophy, that it is the fundamental postulate without which all action and all speculation, philosophy in all its branches, and human consciousness itself, would be impossible.